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On this day: August 12

2014: Actress Lauren Bacall dies at the age of 89 after suffering a stroke. Bacall, who was born Betty Joan Perske, made her film debut opposite her future husband Humphrey Bogart in 1944's "To Have and Have Not" and went on to star alongside Bogart in "The Big Sleep," "Dark Passage" and "Key Largo." She also starred in movies such as "How to Marry a Millionaire" and "Designing Woman." She earned Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for her role in 1996's "The Mirror Has Two Faces."

2007: TV show host and media mogul Merv Griffin dies of prostate cancer at age 82 in Los Angeles, California. From 1965 to 1986 Griffin hosted his own talk show, "The Merv Griffin Show." He also created the game shows "Jeopardy!," "Wheel of Fortune," "Click" and "Merv Griffin's Crosswords" with his own television production companies.

2004: The California Supreme Court voids the nearly 4,000 same-sex marriages sanctioned in San Francisco earlier in the year. The decision led directly to a 2008 decision by the California Supreme Court that legalized same-sex marriages throughout the state. That was followed by Proposition 8 later in 2008, banning same-sex marriages, and the eventual U.S. Supreme Court Case that ended the ban in a 5-4 decision in 2013.

2002: Baseball Hall of Fame right fielder Enos Slaughter dies of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at age 86 in Durham, North Carolina. Slaughter played for four different teams during his 19-year baseball career, but is best known for the years he spent with the St. Louis Cardinals. A 10-time All-Star whose career was interrupted by military service during World War II, he was a part of four World Series champion teams, winning titles in 1942 and 1946 with the Cardinals and in 1956 and 1958 with the New York Yankees.

2000: Actress Loretta Young, an Academy Award-winner for the 1947 film "The Farmer's Daughter," dies of ovarian cancer at age 87 in Los Angeles, California. Young also earned an Oscar nomination for her role in 1949's "Come to the Stable" and hosted the Emmy-winning dramatic anthology series "The Loretta Young Show" from 1953 to 1961. She also starred alongside Clark Gable in a 1935 film adaptation of "The Call of the Wild" and Cary Grant and David Niven in 1947's "The Bishop's Wife."

1994: Major League Baseball players go on strike. The strike would end up lasting 232 days before ending on April 2, 1995, leading to the cancellation of more than 931 games, including the rest of the 1994 season and the entire 1994 postseason and World Series. The World Series cancellation was the first since 1904 and MLB became the first professional sport to lose its entire postseason due to a labor dispute.

1994: The Woodstock '94 music festival opens in Saugerties, New York, on the 25th anniversary of the original Woodstock Music and Art Fair. Bands playing the three-day festival included Blues Traveler, Sheryl Crow, Peter Gabriel, Blind Melon, Nine Inch Nails, Metallica, Aerosmith, Bob Dylan, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day, Santana, Country Joe McDonald and Joe Cocker. As this poster shows, the festival was originally only supposed to last two days, but a third day was added to open the event on Friday, Aug. 12, 1994.

1991: The heavy metal band Metallica releases its self-titled album, often known as "The Black Album" due to its cover. The album would end up producing five hit singles that are considered today among the band's best-known songs: "Enter Sandman," "The Unforgiven," "Nothing Else Matters," "Wherever I May Roam" and "Sad but True."

1990: Sue, the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton found to date, is discovered by Sue Hendrickson in South Dakota. The 42-foot long fossil stands 14 feet tall at its hips and is estimated to have weighed more than 7 short tons when alive. The fossil was eventually auctioned in October 1997 for $7.6 million, the highest amount ever paid for a dinosaur fossil, and is now a permanent feature at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

1988: Painter Jean-Michel Basquiat dies of a heroin overdose at his art studio in New York City's NoHo neighborhood at age 27. Basquiat began as an obscure graffiti artist in New York City in the late 1970s and evolved into an acclaimed Neo-expressionist and Primitivist painter by the 1980s.

1988: Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ" opens in theaters. The film, an adaptation of the controversial 1953 novel of the same name by Nikos Kazantzakis, featured an ensemble cast including Willem Dafoe as Jesus Christ, Harvey Keitel as Judas Iscariot, Barbara Hershey as Mary Magdalene, David Bowie as Pontius Pilate, and Harry Dean Stanton as Paul.

1982: Actor Henry Fonda, the Hollywood legend who starred in such movies as "The Grapes of Wrath," "The Ox-Bow Incident," "Mister Roberts," "12 Angry Men" and "On Golden Pond," dies of heart disease at age 77 in Los Angeles, California. Fonda, who won a Best Actor Oscar for "On Golden Pond" and was also nominated for "The Grapes of Wrath," was also the patriarch of a family of famous actors, including daughter Jane Fonda, son Peter Fonda and granddaughter Bridget Fonda.

1981: The IBM Personal Computer is released.

1977: The space shuttle Enterprise flies on its own for the first time. The Enterprise was carried to a launch height on the back of a Boeing 747 before being jettisoned to glide to a landing on a dry lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

1975: Actor and director Casey Affleck, the younger brother of Ben Affleck known for roles in movies such as "Ocean's Eleven," "Gone Baby Gone" and "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," is born Caleb Casey McGuire Affleck-Boldt in Falmouth, Massachusetts. He earned Academy Award, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations for "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" and also directed the Joaquin Phoenix mockumentary "I'm Still Here."

1973: Jack Nicklaus wins the PGA Championship for his 12th major golf title as a professional. Counting his two U.S. Amateur titles, the win put him over the top in breaking a 50-year record held by Bobby Jones, who had won 13 major titles as a lifelong amateur. Nicklaus would add six more major wins in his professional career for a total of 18 (20 counting his amateur wins), a record that still stands today.

1971: Comedian and actor Michael Ian Black, best known for his roles in TV series like "The State," "Ed," "Viva Variety," "Stella" and "Michael & Michael Have Issues," is born Michael Ian Schwartz in Chicago, Illinois.

1971: Tennis player Pete Sampras, a former world No. 1 who won 14 Grand Slam singles titles and became recognized as one of the greatest tennis players of all time, is born in Potomac, Maryland.

1970: At Harvard Stadium in Boston, Janis Joplin performs what would be her final concert, ending with a version of Gershwin's "Summertime." Joplin would die from a heroin overdose at age 27 on Oct. 4, 1970.

1965: Actor Peter Krause, best known for his roles in the TV series "Sports Night," "Six Feet Under" and "Parenthood," is born in Alexandria, Minnesota.

1964: Ian Fleming, best known for his James Bond series of spy novels, dies of a heart attack at age 56 in Canterbury, England. Fleming, a naval intelligence officer during World War II, wrote his first Bond novel, "Casino Royale," in 1952. Eleven more Bond novels and two short-story collections followed between 1953 and 1966.

1964: South Africa is banned from the Olympic Games due to the country's apartheid policies. The country would not field another Olympic team until the 1992 Summer Olympics, after apartheid had been ended.

1963: Rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot, best known for his 1992 album "Mack Daddy" and its Grammy Award-winning single "Baby Got Back," is born Anthony Ray in Seattle, Washington.

1960: Echo 1A, NASA's first successful communications satellite, is launched. Once in low Earth orbit, the balloon satellite served as a reflector rather than a transceiver, with communication signals bouncing off it from one point on Earth to another.

1955: German author Thomas Mann, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, dies of atherosclerosis at age 80 in Zurich, Switzerland. Mann won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 principally in recognition of his novels "Buddenbrooks" and "The Magic Mountain," and his numerous short stories.

1953: The Soviet atomic bomb project continues with the detonation of "Joe 4," the first Soviet thermonuclear weapon.

1949: Singer-songwriter and guitarist Mark Knopfler, best known as the frontman for the band the Dire Straits, is born in Glasgow, Scotland. After Dire Straits disbanded in 1995, Knopfler started a successful solo career. He's also composed the scores for eight films, including "The Princess Bride" and "Wag the Dog."

1939: Actor George Hamilton, best known for movies such as "Where the Boys Are," "Love at First Bite," "Zorro, the Gay Blade" and "The Godfather Part III," is born in Memphis, Tennessee.

1935: Actor John Cazale is born in Revere, Massachusetts. During a six-year film career that ended with his March 12, 1978, death from bone cancer at age 42, Cazale appeared in five films, "The Godfather," "The Conversation," "The Godfather Part II," "Dog Day Afternoon" (pictured) and "The Deer Hunter," all of which earned Academy Award nominations for Best Picture.

1931: Writer William Goldman, who has won Academy Awards for his screenplays for "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "All the President's Men," is born in Chicago, Illinois. Goldman is also known for his novels "Marathon Man" and "The Princess Bride," both of which he also adapted into screenplays, and also wrote the screenplays for the films "The Stepford Wives," "Misery," "Maverick" and "The Ghost and the Darkness." He's seen here with James Caan on the set of "A Bridge Too Far," which he also wrote, in 1976.

1929: Country music singer-songwriter and guitarist Buck Owens, who had 21 No. 1 hits on the Billboard country music charts with his band the Buckaroos, is born Alvis Edgar Owens Jr. in Sherman, Texas. Owens and his band pioneered what came to be called the Bakersfield sound after his adopted hometown with songs like "Act Naturally" and "I've Got a Tiger By the Tail." Beginning in 1969, he also co-hosted the TV series "Hee Haw" with Roy Clark. He died of in his sleep of a heart attack at the age of 76 on March 25, 2006.

1927: The silent movie "Wings" premieres in New York City. The action film, which starred Clara Bow, Charles "Buddy" Rogers and Richard Arlen, told the story of two World War I fighter pilot friends, both involved with the same beauty. It would go on to win the first Academy Award for Best Picture.

1927: Country music singer-songwriter and guitarist Porter Wagoner, who charted 81 singles from 1954 to 1983 and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, is born in West Plains, Missouri. Wagoner, whose hits included "A Satisfied Mind," "Misery Loves Company," "Green Green Grass of Home" and "The Carroll County Accident," is also known for introducing then-obscure singer Dolly Parton on his long-running television show in 1962 and for pairing up with her on duets through the 1960s and '70s. He died of lung cancer at age 80 on Oct. 28, 2007.

1910: Actress Jane Wyatt, best known for her role as housewife and mother Margaret Anderson on "Father Knows Best" (pictured, with co-star Robert Young) and as the human mother Spock on the TV series "Star Trek," is born in Mahwah, New Jersey. She died at age 96 on Oct. 20, 2006.

1898: An Armistice ends the Spanish-American War.

1898: The Hawaiian flag is lowered from ?Iolani Palace in an elaborate annexation ceremony and replaced with the flag of the United States to signify the transfer of sovereignty from the Republic of Hawaii to the United States.

1883: The last quagga, a subspecies of the plains zebra that lived in South Africa, dies at the Artis Magistra zoo in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The quagga was extinct in the wild by 1878 and only one was ever photographed alive.

1881: Film director Cecil B. DeMille, best known for films such as "Cleopatra," "Samson and Delilah," "The Greatest Show on Earth" and "The Ten Commandments," is born in Ashfield, Massachuseets. He died of a heart attack at age 77 on Jan. 21, 1959.

1880: Hall of Fame baseball pitcher Christy Mathewson, among the most dominant pitchers of his era, is born in Factoryville, Pennsylvania. Mathewson, who ranks in the all-time top-10 in major pitching categories such as wins, shutouts and ERA, played nearly all of his 17-year career with the New York Giants, winning a World Series championship in 1905. He compiled a career record of 373-188 and an ERA of 2.13 and was elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame as one of its five inaugural members in 1936. He died of tuberculosis at age 45 on Oct. 7, 1925.

1851: Isaac Singer is granted a patent for his sewing machine.

1827: English poet and painter William Blake, a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age, dies at age 69 in London, England.

30 B.C.: Cleopatra VII Philopator, the last pharaoh of Ancient Egypt, commits suicide, allegedly by means of an asp bite.

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